LAX96FA344 · Thunder and Colt COLT 240A
Thunder and Colt COLT 240A · Accident: hard landing
From AZ (no airport) to No airport
Event
- NTSB case
- LAX96FA344
- Event typeAccident: someone killed or seriously injured, or the aircraft substantially damaged (NTSB definition). Incident: an occurrence that affected or could have affected safety, short of that. Glossary
- Accident
- InvestigationHow far the investigation had got when the record was published: preliminary, ongoing, final or completed. Unknown where the source does not say. Glossary
- Completed
- API-reported fatalities
- 0 · all aircraft and ground
- Ground fatalities
- 0
- OperationWhat kind of flying it was, grouped by the rules it flew under: airline (US Part 121), air taxi and commuter (Part 135), general aviation (Part 91 and similar), military or government. Glossary
- General aviation
- WeatherVisual meteorological conditions (VMC): good enough to fly by looking outside. Instrument conditions (IMC): cloud or low visibility, flying by instruments. Glossary
- Visual Meteorological Cond
Thunder and Colt COLT 240A
- Aircraft type
- Thunder And Colt COLT 240
- Category
- Balloon
- RegistrationThe aircraft's tail number, such as N12345 or G-ABCD. Registrations are reissued, so the same one years apart can be a different aircraft. Glossary
- N434TC
- Operator
- Jeffrey M. Sherman · private individual
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From AZ (no airport)To No airport
- Aircraft age
- Not recorded
- Flight rulesThe regulations the flight operated under: in the US, Part 91 (general aviation), Part 121 (airlines), Part 135 (air taxi and commuter) and others; for flights abroad, the NTSB's coarser commercial or non-commercial code. Glossary
- Part 91: General Aviation
- Phase of flightThe stage of the flight when things started to go wrong: standing, taxi, takeoff, initial climb, en route, maneuvering, approach or landing. Glossary
- Landing · flare/touchdown
- First occurrenceThe single coded event the NTSB judges best describes what happened (records from 2008 on). Older records name the first occurrence in the sequence instead. Glossary
- Hard landing
- DamageDestroyed: beyond practical repair. Substantial: damage that affects the structure, performance or handling and normally needs major repair. Minor: less than that. Glossary
- Minor
Cause areas
- Pilot in command › Impairment(drugs)
- Pilot in command › Proper descent rate, misjudged
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The pilot received a contract from a resort hotel to provide 13 fare-paying passengers with a balloon ride. Hotel management did not perform a background competency check prior to utilizing the pilot's services. The pilot selected the departure site and did not launch pibals to determine the speed and direction of the winds aloft. The flight commenced from a location about 6 nm north-northeast of the FAA controlled Deer Valley Airport, and the airport's wind was from the northeast. After takeoff, the balloon drifted into the airport's Class D airspace and traffic pattern. The pilot had no communication with the control tower. As the balloon drifted through the airspace, the pilot commenced descending at a high rate and impacted hard in an open field about 1 mile west of the airport. The balloon bounced several times and the pilot failed to turn off the pilot lights or rip open the envelope's deflation panel. The 8-knot surface wind blew the balloon into a cement block wall resulting in the pilot's ejection from the basket. With increased buoyancy, the balloon became airborne. None of the passengers were pilots, and the envelope's skirt ignited when they attempted to control the burners. The balloon impacted the ground two more times, and during each impact groups of passengers exited the basket. The balloon eventually drifted over power lines, an interstate highway, past a gasoline service station, and through the final approach course to active runway 07 until finally coming to rest about 2 miles southwest of the airport. Evidence of cocaine was found in the pilot's blood and its metabolite was found in his urine. The pilot had a previous accident, incident, and FAA enforcement history. As with his previous accident, the pilot failed to submit the required accident report.
Probable cause
The pilot's impairment of judgment and performance due to drugs which led to his misjudgment of his descent rate during landing. Contributing factors were: his failure to activate the deflation device (rip line) and turn off the pilot lights, improper use of burner controls, poor judgment, and the relative high wind condition.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record LAX96FA344
- Event ID
- 20001208X06766
- Case number
- LAX96FA344
- Dataset
- historical-pre2008
- Source SHA-256
- 89e2df6d848e7ab3b42e7d7c7a03ff403303057a26ca04c95b3ea67201c3ce74
Source notes (4)
- Unreviewed is an editorial label, not an investigation status. API-sourced is not report-checked or human-reviewed. Explicit event totals are used without summing aircraft injury tables; onboard allocation is withheld. Unknown values remain unknown. The operation category is mapped from the NTSB-reported FAR part and has not been reviewed.
- Filled from the NTSB case API where the bulk record had no value: investigation status. Values present in the bulk record are kept.
- The date is the local date, which is the same as the UTC date the NTSB stores.
- API snapshot SHA-256: e2479d8ead4836e3128281971bf0e0180944aa6a59a26dc907faa0fea7773d02; retrieved 2026-09-21T12:26:47.987Z.